Leave v remain led us into ugly binary thinking. We must break out of it
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Version 0 of 1. Our current approach encourages people to hold on to fixed identities. What it can never do is describe how it is to be alive in the modern world, says Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore Everything I say here is right. Everyone who disagrees with me is wrong. I am on the right side of history because I decide what history is and ignore the bits that don’t fit my cut-and-paste narrative of superiority. I know what I stand for, and it’s not nuanced, for God’s sake. Nuance, shilly-shallying, dithering: all this is for enemies of the people. And who are the people? Again, whoever I say they are. “The people” are a movable feast, as are the “working class”, “austerity”, “neoliberalism” and “Brexit”. Just rearrange these words into a sentence, and you will shine with pure light. Although some of us may not want your leaflet. There is an election about to unfurl after all, and this is the time to take sides. You are one thing or the other. So I am duty-bound to speak out for the other. I am on a spectrum of my own marvellous political creation. What do you mean tick a box? That’s so 20th century. Let’s rewind, shall we? Part of the fine mess we are in is because of a question that posed a fake binary in 2016: remain or leave. Membership of the EU was much too complex an issue to sort out via simple dualism. A lot of us would have gone for an option that said: stay and sort it out a bit. But that choice was not there. Leave morphed into a campaign not for negotiating a way out of a series of trade deals, but a moral crusade, peculiarly retro and radical – just not radical in the way the majority of readers of this paper would understand it. Remain became a dull ache, nostalgic for the fake tolerance that peaked with the 2012 Olympics, and often expressed through InterRailing holidays. Remain felt itself to be modern and progressive, while the People’s Vote campaign was run by has-beens who understood the nature of modern Britain as little as the “culturally backward” folk who are continually vox-popped outside boarded-up shops. No one gave a toss about Scotland or Ireland – they didn’t fit the binary. The fallout has resulted in another set of false choices and electoral promises that have little to do with reality and everything to do with propping up a two-party system that has already been shown to fail. In the leadership of the three main parties, we now have a proven liar, someone who does not have the loyalty of his own party and an opportunist. Then there is Farage, the peripatetic fluffer of the world’s fascists. So, ultimately, our choice in the election is between Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson, and I am not a fan of either. I reject the false binary between “austerity” and a tolerable amount of antisemitism, which has led to various drive-bys online telling me to die in a ditch. Ditches must be crowded these days. “Do you understand what is at stake?” people yell. To which I say: this is all part of the same issue, this reduction of the world to binaries, the elevation of inflexibility of thought to purity. We are caught in a deeply adolescent way of thinking. No one is more certain of who is good and who is bad than a teenager. This absolute splitting of the world is something the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein called “paranoid thinking”. There is no point bemoaning polarisation, as many now do, if you are not prepared to challenge binary thinking. We understand multilinear narratives – we know something can be a wave and a particle. We feel that nature v nurture is too simplistic a way to speak of human experience. Binary thinking encourages hierarchies and it encourages people to hold on to fixed identities. What it can’t do is describe how it is to be in the modern world. It may be reassuring, but it blocks innovation, and, yes, it is paranoid. Screaming “centrist!” on Twitter may give some people a cheap thrill. But it changes the world not a jot. In the midst of political stasis, we need to think about how to break the deadlock, not just in parliament, but in our own thinking. No one is going to offer you that choice in the election, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make it. • Suzanne Moore is a Guardian columnist |